…requires more than just good programming.

Ebay bug?

A couple of weeks ago I received a rather expensive looking tie in the post. I hadn’t ordered it and there was no note or letter to say who it had come from. How very odd. As a microISV my work attire doesn’t get any more formal than a t-shirt and I don’t ‘do’ meetings. Perhaps a happy user of PerfectTablePlan had sent it in gratitude for saving them hours with post-it notes?

Then the books started appearing. First “Julius Caesar” by Shakespear. Shortly followed by “The life of charlemagne”, “Travels through France and Italy” and “In the shadows of vesuvius”. Then finally “The complete angler”. Perhaps I had a cyber-stalker? One with rather refined tastes.

I have been buying lego duplo for my son on Ebay. Maybe one of the sellers got confused and sent the wrong items? I did some digging around on EBay and found that one person had purchased all the above items on Ebay. I contacted him and the sellers to find out what was going on. The sellers all said they had sent the goods to my address, as provided by EBay. The buyer said that his EBay delivery address had mysteriously changed to my address. He has since paid me the postage and I have forwarded them on to his real address.

To the best of my knowledge the buyer and I have never had any dealings with each other, through EBay or otherwise. So it is unlikely that he mistakenly supplied my address to EBay. Also there is no incentive for him to have deliberately changed his address to mine. The only rational explanation I can come up with is that this mix-up was caused by an egregious bug in EBay. Perhaps the bugs at PayPal are spreading to it’s parent company? Has anyone else heard of similar EBay address mix-ups?